I'm learning a new programming language nowadays - Kotlin and could not miss the opportunity to practice it with the BitcoinTalk raw data for merit flow available by https://bitcointalk.org/merit.txt.xz.

I've got an idea that probably merit is going in circles - one user merits another, then second user merits the third and then third returns merit to the first. For whatever reason.

With the available data it is quite easy to check. I'm not that good at algorithms, so just created a quick and dirty script.

All these new programming languages ( can we still call them languages) are quite fascinating. I've been collecting the free ebooks from packt, and I keep meaning to try to use some of them.

I started a new project in Java recently, but Java really drives me mad, too verbose even with lambdas. And in Java10 they fucked up with 'var' and 'val'. So I switched to Kotlin as I can't avoid JVM anyway. Very happy with the language so far.